How to Retain Your Paid Membership Subscribers

Guest Post by Ada. It is very important to retain paid membership subscribers. You might be very successful in attracting new members to your paid membership site but if you don’t know how to retain them month after month, it’s no use. Read this article to learn how to keep your subscribers happy and have them onboard for long periods of time.

Keep the Good Content Constantly Pouring

Obviously, your subscribers have voted for you with their money because they are interested in what you have to offer. This is why it is of paramount importance to keep the good content constantly pouring. Nobody says that all your articles must be masterpieces because this is impossible but if you don’t maintain a permanent high quality, you will start losing subscribers for sure.

Drip Feed to Retain Interest

Drip Feeding – Serve Content in Drops. Drip feeding is one of the best strategies to retain user interest. The approach is similar to TV series, where the series ends just when the plot thickens. Similarly, with the right WordPress membership plugin, you can schedule your content in a way that spans from one month into the next.

For instance, if you are starting new series, publish the first one or two parts at the end of this month and announce that the rest will be coming next month. This way if people are interested in the dripped content, they will hurry to renew their subscription for the next month, so they don’t miss the end.

Ensure Good User Experience

Even if your content is top notch, if your site is messy, this doesn’t help. You need to have an easy to navigate site. You wouldn’t like your subscribers to be missing content they paid for simply because they can’t find it, would you? You need to put in visible places all the links to the content your members are entitled to, so that they can find it with ease.

Offer Volume Discounts and Discounts for Prepayment

Volume discounts also work well. For instance, if you have corporate clients, you can offer 3 memberships for the price of two. This might be valuable for a company because it allows 3 separate individuals to be members. Of course, if you are serving the same content to everybody, getting 3 times the same stuff is pure waste of money for the company but if your membership site is around personality (i.e. a paid forum or a professional network), one extra profile for free is always welcome.

However, even if you don’t have corporate clients who will appreciate the volume discount I explained in the first paragraph, you can always give discounts for prepayment. For instance, you can offer 6 months for the price of 5. This way you ensure you will get paid for at least 5 months in advance. Don’t consider the month you are giving for free a loss because if the subscriber dropped after the first month, you would have lost 4 months’ fees instead.

Use Teasers to Announce New Content

Just when your subscribers think they have seen all you can offer, announce new forthcoming stuff – be it new features or new content. You can put the announcement in a visible place onsite or send your users emails. In any case, make sure that the teaser is easy to notice. You can announce when the new stuff is coming (i.e. next month), or you can leave the proposal open to keep them teased even more.

Don’t Forget The Personal Touch

Your subscribers aren’t a crowd – they are separate individuals and it is recommendable to treat them as such. If you have thousands of subscribers you will hardly be able to remember all of them but there are other ways in which you can add a personal touch to their experience.

For instance, if at registration you ask them for their birthday, you can set birthday reminders and congratulate them on the day. You can also send personalized emails in which you address your subscribers by name. All these are small gestures but they help to make your members feel special.

Build a Community

The personal touch is great but you also need to build the sense of community, an exquisite club they are fortunate to belong to. If possible, you can schedule live events (online and offline) to meet in person because this more than anything else creates the feeling you are part of a community made up of real people, not just anonymous nicknames.

Retaining your paid members shouldn’t be that difficult, if you perform according to their expectations. Still, sometimes no matter what you do, even if you are perfect, they won’t stay. Don’t allow this to break you but concentrate on retaining your remaining members and attracting new ones instead.

Guest author Ada is the Blogger Relations Manager at WinkPress, which is a web resource about leveraging WordPress, its themes, and plugins to create versatile and unusual websites. Image by Eva under CC license.